Currently, consumers, business professionals and other individuals (hereinafter, “viewers”) often have more than one device (screen) on which or with which they view and consume information. FIG. 1 shows a typical variety of screens 100 that are currently available to viewers. With reference to FIG. 1, the range of size of the screens 100 is substantial. On the smaller end, there is a smart phone 102, and on the larger end there is a monitor 110 such as a computer monitor and a television 112. Of course there are other screens not shown in FIG. 1 that are also available to viewers such as music playing devices. Content or information may also be shown by a projector including a personal projection device.
Viewers consume information on a variety of screens 100 and surfaces and in a variety of sizes of software application frame or window 120. Within a typical day, viewers typically use more than one of the screens 100 such as a smart phone 102, a touch screen 104 (such as on a printer, scanner and copy machine), a tablet computer 106, a notebook computer 108, a monitor 110 and a television 112. Further, viewers use more than one of these devices or screens 100 to access the same or same type of information. Currently, information is often in a network-accessible location such as in a “cloud” location—typically, a computer or service that is contractually operated and made available to a viewer. Such service may be free or may be provided in exchange for money.
Various devices and screens 100 typically handle the task of displaying text available, stored or encoded in a digital form with some level of grace. An encoded form implies that each character of a batch of information or text is encoded, character by character, in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) or some other encoding scheme. With encoded text, various devices 100 are free to render the text according to the programming of its hardware and/or software.
However, desirable and valuable information often includes text in one or more various forms that are not encoded character by character. Such information is often found in an electronic image. Such information is often treated no differently than any other image or no differently than any other part of an image. Consequently, such information is not in a very portable, useable or manipulatable format. Such information also does not easily scale for use on a device attached to or having a relatively small screen (hereinafter “small device”). On a small device, the text either becomes unreadable as an entire document is resized to fit onto the screen or a viewer is forced to repeatedly scroll a document side to side and up and down while reading each line and page of text at a resolution close to or similar to that of an image including a copy of the original text. Further, such text or information is often not indexed or searchable.
A user confronted with such desirable information has hereto been forced to choose between two schemes for preserving and accessing the information. One option or scheme has been to leave the information in an image-based form, with or without compression. This option includes turning the image into a “document” or using a software program to view the original image. However, even if the words, text and information are recognized, the image or document suffers from the shortcomings described above—including the inability to view the text with some level of practicality.
The other option or scheme has been to transform the information by scanning it and performing some form of optical character recognition (OCR) on it. This second option also has substantial shortcomings. For example, the look and feel of the original text is not fully retained and often the surrounding and/or background are lost—stripped by the OCR process. Further, OCR is not a perfect process and therefore yields an imperfect recognition of characters in the text or text region of an image. Strikethrough, underlining, and italicization are just a few of the formats that cause trouble for OCR processing. While a recognized version of the text may become more usable than a raw image of the original text through this second option, the original text has been transformed, encoded and reformatted into another form that in many cases does not resemble the original text. For example, the text or information is shown according to the preferences, settings and abilities of the hardware and software on a particular device. Thus, neither option is appealing to discriminating viewers.
These and other shortcomings of the current art are overcome by use of the present invention.